A Mile of Pizza

Here's your nightly math! Just 5 quick minutes of number fun for kids and parents at home. Read a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in. Your kids will love you for it.

A Mile of Pizza

It’s hard enough to eat a long, gooey slice of pizza. Well, try eating a pizza that’s a mile long! In 2016 in Naples, Italy, 250 pizza chefs got together to make the world’s longest pizza. It measured 6,082 feet long, well over 1 mile. The pizza used more than 2 *tons* of flour, 2 tons of fiordilatte cheese, and 3,500 pounds of tomatoes. It was then rolled through 5 giant ovens, each of which needed 25 people to run it. The whole thing weighed 5 tons in total. Check out the math to find out how many people it would take to eat it!

Wee ones: If the pizza used flour, cheese, tomatoes and olive oil, how many ingredients is that?

Little kids: If the pizza used about 2 tons each of flour, cheese and tomatoes, how many tons of food is that? Bonus: A ton is 2,000 pounds. How many pounds is 6 tons? Count up by 2s (2,000s) to find out!

Big kids: If a person can eat 2 pounds of pizza before feeling way too full, how many people can that 6-ton pizza feed? (Again, a ton has 2,000 pounds) Bonus: If they gave you 28 slices of your own, and you eat 1 slice per day starting on a Monday, on what day of the week do you eat the last one?

The sky’s the limit: If the 250 pizza makers wanted to work together in equal-sized groups, how many ways could they have split up evenly?

Answers:Wee ones: 4 ingredients.

Little kids: 6 tons. Bonus: 12,000 pounds!

Big kids: 6,000 people. Bonus: On a Sunday. You have an even number of sets of 7, and remember, each set starting on a Monday (day 1) finishes on a Sunday (day 7).

The sky’s the limit: 6 ways, because 250 has a lot of “factors” (numbers that divide into it evenly). They could form:
2 groups of 125 people each
5 groups of 50
10 groups of 25
25 groups of 10
50 groups of 5
and 125 groups of 2.

About the Author

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking while still in diapers, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.